Marxist Intellectuals and the Working-Class Mentality in Germany: 1887-1912.

Initially, I was somewhat reluctant to review this book, since it involved a subject with which I am fairly unfamiliar. But a question on the jacket intrigued me: "How does one explain the presence of educated recruits in movements that were overwhelmingly working class in composition?" By answering this question in turn-of-the-century Germany, we might also gain perspective regarding other popular movements in other time periods, such as the populist surgings in the United States or the Civil Rights movement in the rural South. A question I thought worth addressing was, did the intellectuals lead, and the movement follow, or was it the other way around? As it turns out, neither was the case.

Pierson begins by noting that Marx and Engels provided a different answer to my question in the Communist Manifesto. This answer was both. Intellectuals are initially led by the laws of historical development and abandon their class to join the workers, but their intellectual prowess allows them to then lead, by further educating the working class as to its social condition and its historical task.

The first chapter of this book describes how a group of young intellectuals, outsiders who were never fully accepted or trusted by their less well educated brethren, attempted the "enlightenment of the masses." This attempt, for the most part, ended in discouragement and dissolution, with a recognition of a "great gulf between Marx's forecast and the development of the workers."

The second chapter addresses the role of the academics in this social movement, and the difficulty they faced in establishing a new mentality among the working class. The next several chapters show how Marxist intellectuals generally took two paths in interpreting and advancing the ideas of Marx, what Marx meant from a cultural perspective, the (then) contemporary need to revise Marx, and how these revisions were defeated as dogma by the orthodox Marxists. Interspersed in all this is a continuing suspicion of the intellectuals (both by the workers and of each other) with regards to motive, sincerity, and intent.

With the return of orthodoxy as the dominate party position, the attempt to create a general socialist mentality within the working class is addressed. A twofold attempt to rekindle enthusiasm and deepen theoretical understanding among the rank and file ultimately was a failure. As revisions of orthodox dogma again began to occur, the nationalist movement was also beginning to take shape. Accommodations were attempted, and ultimately most of what we would recognize as orthodox Marxism vanished from the dominate political scenes, bringing the relationship between Marxist intellectuals and the working class to an end.

This book provides a well researched historical account of a brief, but intellectually lively, period of a time and place of which I was quite unfamiliar. It shows how the intellectuals, attempting to work within the Social Democratic Party, tried and failed to create a new working class mentality. Aside from the book providing interesting reading we might ask, as one of my graduate school professors always did, what are the policy implications? Though a tempting answer (as was the case even back then) is none, I am not sure this would be entirely true. We know what happens to those that ignore history. As intellectual movements (if you can call them that) are advanced by supply-siders, new democrats, and contractarians, we are often tempted to see ideological shifts in what we now recognize as the dominate middle class. But these shifts, in retrospect, are but mere blips on the political scene. Is it, as was the case in turn of the century Germany, that, while appearing to buy into a particular view, what actually occurs is a suspicious acceptance of these intellectual ideas by the middle class. Since the creators and advancers of these ideas are never trusted, they are abandoned at the first sign of failure. The lesson learned by the Marxists in the episode described in this book is worthy of consideration. The working, or middle, class is fickle, and they do not trust intellectuals, for the most part.

John J. Bethune Bellarmine College